PhD students honored at Prix Ars Electronica

Media Arts + Practice PhD candidates Nonny de la Peña and Juri Hwang recently received awards for their creative work at the 2017 Prix Ars Electronica.

de la Peña received an Award of Distinction in the Computer Animation/Film/VFX category for her project Out of Exile. Hwang received an Honorary Mention in the Digital Musics/Sound Art category for her project Somatic Echo.

For over a century, the American Academy in Rome has awarded the Rome Prize to support innovative and cross-disciplinary work in the arts and humanities. Rome Prize Fellowships include a stipend, room and board, and individual work space at AAR’s eleven-acre campus in Rome.

Slamdance DIG 2016

DIG (Digital, Interactive, and Gaming) is an exciting and innovative new showcase from the Slamdance Film Festival. Co-curated by iMAP PhD candidate Samantha Gorman, the show is dedicated to spotlighting emerging independent artists working in hybrid, immersive, and interactive forms of digital art.

DIG projects emphasize touch, personal visual perspective, innovative connections between space and movement, or finding sense in uncertainty. This year eight works will be featured in the DIG show, including a virtual reality music sandbox, reality blurring VR, installation-based video games, and an interactive dance experience.

The series won first prize in the Challenge of Diversity competition organized by Interlude, Games for Change and Tribeca Film Festival.

Downtown Browns is an interactive web series highlighting the decisions faced by women of color in Los Angeles. Each episode follows a different bright woman through a unique situation, and utilizes interactive decisions to build intimate understandings of the dynamics challenging diverse city life.

Downtown Browns is produced by a core team of radical creators based in Los Angeles: Tonia Beglari, Jazmin Garcia, Emilia Yang, Allison Comrie, and Luciana Chamorro. Together, they combined their social justice sensitivities, fresh aesthetics, and creative tech wits to produce thoughtful interactive film experiences that promote intimacy and understanding with women of color.

The new issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly from Duke University Press includes an article by MA+P alum Dr. micha cárdenas titled "Pregnancy: Reproductive Futures in Trans of Color Feminism".

The author's hybrid poetry/bioart project, Pregnancy, presents a vision of trans Latina reproductive futures, based on her experiences of cryogenic tissue banking (namely sperm banking) after having been on hormones for many years. At the 2014 Civil Liberties and Public Policy Conference, Morgan Robyn Collado stated that violence against trans women of color is a reproductive issue because they are prevented from living long enough to realize their dreams of having children.

Trans women of color want more than just to live. Existing literature on transgender pregnancy and family planning focuses almost exclusively on transgender men. Books such as Trans Bodies, Trans Selves focus almost entirely on trans men, while making only the most brief reference to the fact that trans women can bank their sperm. This reproduces a trans-misogynist dynamic in which trans men are highly valued by queer communities and transgender women’s concerns and existence are erased.

Six finalists will be preselected by the judges for public screening at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra on the evening of October 27, 2016. The ultimate winner will be determined via audience participation at the screening.

iMAP Student Clea T. Waite Exhibiting at ISEA 2016

Big Moon Hong Kong, a new site-specific video by iMAP PhD candidate Clea T. Waite, premieres at the Open Sky Gallery in Hong Kong in May on the ICC Tower LED façade as part of the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) 2016.

The ICC is the tallest building in Hong Kong and the largest screen in the world; at 118 stories and 490 meters above sea level, the building façade is comprised of 77,000 square meters of LED’s.

Big Moon Hong Kong evokes the power, presence, and emotional gravity our Moon commands, a tangible Moon unfolding over the city. Created from actual lunar photographs, this piece includes views we can’t ever see from Earth, vistas seen only by probes and the astronauts – and perhaps the greater galaxy.